The Wonderful World of Sophasaurus

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Dubstep has exploded onto the music scene in the past couple years. If you have never heard any dubstep before, well, this song by Skrillex won a goddamn Grammy:

There are nitpickers out there, though, who will tell you that Skrillex isn't really dubstep, but more like UK electro. Real dubstep sounds more like this:

Let us accept for now that both of these count as "dubstep," even though they clearly have some stylistic differences between them. Distinguishing between them would be a discussion for "insiders," and this is a guide for "outsiders."

To attempt to define it: dubstep is a sort of melting pot for musical tropes from several
different genres of EDM (electronic dance music). It is generally
bass-heavy, moving at 140 bpm, but with the slowish kind of "riddim"
characteristic of reggae and dub music. It uses digital production
techniques that will start with any sound in the world, then warp and
twist that beyond any recognition. The genre is something of an acquired taste, and for those who have not yet acquired that taste, it can sound a bit like a computer having a coughing fit while falling down a flight of stairs, or just a non-stop "wub wub wub wub wubwubwubwubwubwub."

In an attempt to explain how this happened to become a whole genre of music, and why people actually like it, I am going to be focusing on some "family resemblances" that the music has with other genres. I don't have much of a musical vocabulary when it comes to things like theory and chord progression, but even if I did, I don't think that approach would help the lay person understand any of this better. Instead, what I'm going to be doing is talking broadly about the resemblances between different musical styles, and then providing songs that illustrate what I'm talking about.

My qualifications to talk about this subject mostly have to do with listening to a lot of EDM for the past 15 years or so. To make yourself more familiar with the genres, it will help if you start with Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. I think it's worth your time to look at every genre there, but for now you should start with following genres, because I will be referring to them later: goa trance, progressive trance, jungle, drum n bass, IDM.

Let me start off by saying, though, that people get into all sorts of
arguments about what is and isn't dubstep. Plenty of people could argue
with me about any of the things in this post... but it isn't for those people. What I'm trying to do here is say, "Listen to these other kinds of music that you probably haven't heard of. Do you see the resemblance now?" So let's get to it.

Dub music
Dub emerged as a genre in the 60s from producing remixes of reggae songs to serve as B-sides. Its pioneers were straight up wizards when it came to studio equipment--they say that King Tubby knew what was going on down to the electron, and Scientist could build his own equipment from scratch if he needed to. Their remixing efforts involved a lot of reverb, echo, sound loops, and cutting the different master tracks in and out in unconventional ways.

What dubstep takes from this is the tempo, and the devotion to remixing music as much as possible in any way possible. And, I guess, making a genre of music that sounds a lot better if you've been smoking a lot of weed. I mean, some people will say that any music will sound better if you're high, but they're wrong.

Jungle
In its early form, jungle music had a lot to do with creative, flowing drum patterns... at least, that is what you will hear if you listen to the samples in Ishkur's guide. But if you went to a rave ten years ago where they had a lineup of jungle DJs, you would hear something like this mix by Dieselboy: hard, fast, abrassive, with lots of squelchy and distorted sounds. This "dirty" sound is a lot of what dubstep inherited from jungle.

A rave's "jungle room" circa 2000

Side note: if you went to a rave ten years ago, the douchiest douchebags you could meet there were usually in the jungle room. Back then, they wore oversize hoodies, often with "urban camo" patterns, and usually also wore a visor or a baseball cap. Dubstep seems to overlap a lot with this demographic, but I cannot explain why it is that people who like dirty bass tend to be douchebags.

Progressive trance
Trance music started out as something that was pretty constant and repetitive, which was a lot of the point--you know, for putting you into a trance. Progressive trance added a breakdown/buildup element to the music, making it far more palatable to general audiences, and also making it easier to have a "radio edit" of any given song.

To give you an idea of the difference I'm talking about, here is a classic trance song from 1992:

Now here is a progressive trance song from 1996:

And here is some bullshit that clubgoers couldn't stop hearing in 2000:

Why did this structural change suddenly make the music more popular? EDM's previous focus was mostly on keeping people dancing, people who are often a little intoxicated (wink, wink), but radio listeners aren't known for their patience when it comes to long, repetitive songs. Oh, sure, there are exceptions, like "Love Shack" and "Hey Jude," but this was an entire genre that seemed to be nothing but repetition. Introducing breakdowns meant breaking up the intensity into bits that were easier to digest. At first, this was usually done with string sections and somebody talking about finding the goddess energy inside you, but thankfully, today's breakdowns are generally less cheesy.

Now, obviously, progressive trance sounds nothing like dubstep. But the breakdown techniques have shown, somewhat experimentally, how much intensity people can handle from their music before it needs to be dialed back a bit. Thus, a common structure for dubstep songs is to have a "drop" that comes in somewhere between 0:30 and 1:30 (often accompanied by a drumroll), which is where they introduce the main, uh, "melody." Then they dial it back a bit, maybe to where they were before the drop, going back and forth, probably introducing variations along the way. Here are a couple examples:

IDM and Glitch
One of the most unfortunately named genres of EDM, the acronym stands for "Intelligent Dance Music." Rather than trying to create a riff people could groove on, and repeating that riff for eight minutes, IDM producers sought to make music that required you to stop and pay attention to it. Listen to it. The constant changes keep you paying attention to what's going on, instead of tuning it out into the background. (And if you are trying to tune it out into the background, it is going to really annoy you.) A non-EDM example I know of is the metal band Mastodon. At any rate, here is a sampling of songs from the genre:

(There are lots of other things that fall under IDM but have a much softer feel to them. All three of the above artists have songs like this, but in the case of Plaid, it is just about they only thing they make. While those songs are important to the genre, generally speaking, I think they have had less influence on dubstep.)

What dubstep took from this genre has a lot to do with the changing, syncopated rhythms, but also, you know, having that "skipping CD/corrupted data" sound to it. Those sounds were already finding their way into more mainstream EDM as early as 2000:

Hell, even Nine Inch Nails cut a pretty awesome track that I would almost call IDM:

Goa and Psytrance
Goa and psytrance started out lot more like the "classic trance" from earlier, except it went off into a weird kind of sci-fi direction. Sometimes that meant having deeper, more complex melodies that are like a six minute synth solo. Sometimes it meant putting down layer after layer of different sounds and melodies weaving in and out of each other, or setting up a level of predictability that was then shattered unexpectedly. Generally speaking, they were exploring how you could make some of the most fucked up, psychedelic sounds possible... and I think dubstep does that a lot, too, but with a slightly different approach. In my experience, this means the genres are both equally engaging while one is on LSD, because what used to be too much intensity to handle all at once becomes just the right amount of intensity and I don't ever want it to stop!

For examples, here is a song that I consider to be a masterpiece of the genre:

However, Hux Flux's "Idiot" has a lot more of the musical elements I have been discussing so far:

Psybient and Psydub
The popularity of trance has faded over the years, and people who used to be really into psytrance are usually now into psybient. On the simplest level, it is pretty much what you get when you slow down psytrance, take out the "four to the floor" bass beat, and add a bunch of new agey stuff. While many psytrance artists have put individual psybient tracks on their albums over the years, Shpongle's "Are You Shpongled?" was probably the most influential, and one of the first artists to be making nothing but psybient.

One of the production techniques you can hear there, which is used also by dubstep, is the way it treats samples. They get chopped up into little pieces, then some of those pieces get thrown away, and some pieces get repeated and resampled. If we can use Google as any kind of reference, nothing was called dubstep until 2006, but the Shpongle track above came out in 1998. I'm not going to say that dubstep wouldn't exist without psybient, but it would probably be a less diverse genre.

The similarity between the genres is why you will see pot-smoking hippies at dubstep shows. Mixed in with the aforementioned douchebags, this makes for a strange collection of people. But there has also been some overlap and intermingling between the musical styles. Here is what Phutureprimitive sounded like in 2004:

And here is Phutureprimitive in 2011:

There is still the new agey hippie music in the background, but the whole album is generally more bassy and, generally speaking, more like dubstep.

Demographic Changes
Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to make EDM, it meant buying at least two synthesizers and a drum machine, as well as some software on your computer to control them. That's what got you started. Hallucinogen's gear page (courtesy of Archive.org's Wayback Machine) lists eight synthesizers and twelve effects processors. People back then would get into debates about whether it was better to buy digital or analog synthesizers, or whether it was worth the money to buy vintage equipment like the TB-303. Everyone swore allegiance to particular brands of equipment, and would not shut their mouths about how terrible the other brands were.

Then, once you had produced a song, you either had to find a record label to pick you up, or pay out of pocket to run off some vinyl records. Making your own CDs or cassettes was only an option if you didn't care about whether DJs played your music.

Today, in 2012, you don't need anything but a decent computer (most likely, the one you already have), and Ableton. Here's how you can make Smack My Bitch Up, and here's an a cappella version of Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, both possible with nothing but a laptop. There is no barrier to entry for making music, and processing the audio effects is near-instantaneous compared to what it was in the '90s. And letting other people hear your music? Even easier--people can buy your stuff on Bandcamp or Beatport, or you could just let them listen to it with Soundcloud. Want to make a music video for your song? You still don't need anything but your laptop for editing, and your cell phone could probably make some decent video recordings.

Similarly, becoming a DJ has never been easier. In the '90s, it meant buying at least $200 worth of equipment, and that stuff was super shitty. Professional-grade gear would set you back $1000 to $2000. Today, again, all you need is a laptop. You can buy other things that make the job easier

And somewhere in this whole mess, there is something about the rise of technology, and its accompanying sounds, imprint on our subconscious and affect the kinds of music that we are going to enjoy. Or whatever. But I don't personally have a lot I could say to back that up.

To sum up...
Here is a bulleted list of the things I have talked about, in case you got lost along the way.

Dirty bass

"Drops" and breakdowns

Varying rhythms

Weird, fucked up sounds

Anyone can make it

Wubwubwubwubwubwub

What's a good introduction to dubstep?
There are two ways you could go about this. The one that requires the least effort is to listen to go to DI.fm and listen to their dubstep station--it's really rather good, and I'm usually impressed by the "Dank 'N' Dirty Dubz" mixes. Similarly, you could go to Pandora, and start their dubstep genre station.

If you want some artists to check out, you could do worse than to start with:

Beats Antique

Skrillex

Flux Pavillion

Bassnectar

The Glitch Mob

Zomboy

That is by no means a representative sample, but it will get you started. Go look them up on Grooveshark, or YouTube, or your own preferred method for getting music from the internet. You might find that, though you understand the music a bit better, you just don't like it. And that's okay. But you might also find yourself listening to nothing but dubstep all day and pissing off everyone around you, in which case it might be time to invest in some quality headphones.

What does it mean when dubstep is "grimey"?
That is the dubstep that sounds like a computer having a coughing fit while falling down a flight of stairs.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

I was thinking about Plato's cave analogy, because I had forgotten what it was an analogy for, when I remembered that it was Plato saying, "If you have knowledge of the forms of the world, you know more than if you just knew about the things of the world." My gut reaction was, "Man, that is dumb. Sounds profound for about five seconds, and then you realize it's dumb." Trying to clarify exactly why I would say such a thing... my answer became a little more nuanced.

One interpretation is that if you understand what chairs are for, how they are used, and how they are built, you understand chairs much better, potentially in a way that you could understand how to design and engineer a new chair. But the question is whether this means knowing the form of the chair.

But this is not how Plato thinks of Forms. Instead, they are abstract things that exist apart from the material world. Sadly for Plato, much of the academic theorizing of the past century has been about exploring the social construction of our world, and how it has such little attachment to anything that is objective and universal. The study of history, for example, is about constructing a narrative to explain the causality of past events. Historical myths abound because of how much more we like an interesting story.

How deep does it go? Well, I heard a rumor at my college that one of the math teachers stopped teaching the 100-level Intro to Analysis because he had heard enough objections to set theory that he could no longer believe in it. This was a class in which the students went through all the proofs that numbers exist, and that you can do arithmetic with them, and it is all founded on set theory.

And really, at the end of the day, the universe is just a bunch of matter doing stuff. We happen to have good models and theories for how that matter behaves, but the universe happens to be completely indifferent to whatever we think about it. Even if there is objectivity in math and the natural sciences, though, any abstract knowledge of chairs is going to be knowledge about them as a social construction, because there just isn't any other form of it.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

The Bullseye podcast, with Jesse Thorn, occasionally interviews musicians about songs that changed their lives. The answers range from The Beatles to a guy who made music for player pianos. For me, that song was Orbital's The Box, released in 1996. The drum pattern backing the song is pretty typical of the other electronic music of the time, but there's no vocals or samples. There's just that moody, eery music.

When I was growing up, the only music I can remember having in the house was Bon Jovi and the Top Gun soundtrack. When I was eight or nine years old, I started listening to Weird Al, and the local top 40 radio station. I didn't really know anything about the other radio stations that might be out there, except that I didn't want to listen to what my parents were listening to.

Eventually, when I was about 12, I started listening to the local alternative station, mostly because it was what my friends were listening to. It didn't take long before I started getting exposed to the electronica music that was starting to hit the airwaves in 1996. In addition to "The Box," I also enjoyed Prodigy's Firestarter, and the Chemical Brothers' Setting Sun--in the latter case, possibly because I liked Oasis, and it had one of them doing vocals for the song.

For the radio station's "Deck the Hall Ball" that year, they booked The Presidents of the United States of America, Silverchair, the Butthole Surfers, Stabbing Westward, Fun Lovin' Criminals, and the Eels. They initially booked the Chemical Brothers as the closing act, but those guys had to drop out because of something like an ear infection, and they booked Orbital instead. I was not able to go to this concert, of course, because that would have meant having money for a ticket. However, the radio station broadcast the tail end of the show. They were running later than expected, and it wasn't until about midnight that Orbital came on.

They played for two fucking hours, and it just blew my mind. Until then, I had no idea that you could make music without words that was still able to evoke different moods and textures. Go listen to The Box again, compare it to those other songs and artists I mentioned above, and I think you'll agree that it is a completely different thing from what anyone else was doing at the time. They didn't become as popular as some of the other artists (at least not in America), but they weren't making music meant for bumping night clubs.

I devoured every Orbital album after that, and then started branching out into other electronic music, everything from trance DJ mixes to 8-bit chiptunes made on some guy's Amiga in Finland. Most of the music I own today is electronic dance music, and some of it has had a pretty profound influence on me. I might never have had the chance to hear any of it if it weren't for Orbital.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

The life lessons I remember from church (all two or three of them) were all given by the same youth pastor, whose name was Orville. For one of them, he started out by having us raise our hands if we thought love was something you felt. Then he asked us if love was something you did. He then followed it with two stories. The first, he told us about the time he had to have knee surgery, and really felt like he loved his nurse. It, of course, was her job to make sure he was comfortable and happy, and also he was on a lot of painkillers. There was nothing there that was going to last once he was out of the hospital.

In the other story, he was in the army. One of the guys in the barracks had a fondness for screwdrivers and Doritos, things not allowed in the barracks, but someone managed to sneak some in for him. He over-indulged, though, and ended up vomiting all over the floor, just orange juice and chewed up Doritos. Everyone there cleaned it up for him, so that he wouldn't get in trouble, and though they probably wouldn't admit this, they did it because they loved him.

It kind of blew my mind at the time, and I couldn't believe it at first. But the idea stuck with me, probably for the very reason that it was such an odd idea, one that I didn't feel like I heard from anywhere else.

This went pretty well with my inherent distrust of the romance I saw portrayed in TV and movies. It always had this ring of falsity to it, like the stuff people did were stereotypical things that real-life people did not really do that often. I recently learned that I do not have a natural and instinctual ability to feel empathy for people, so that was probably part of it. I eventually took an additionally cold and scientific view of the "falling in love" feeling that people get, that the love we celebrate so much is nothing but a temporary chemical state in your brain that will be gone before you know it. I felt this myself, from time to time, and it's definitely a great feeling to be riding on when you can, but it almost never panned out into anything more than being friends.

I took this idea of mistrust a step further: if I am going to convince someone that I love them, it is not enough just to use my words, because I could be lying. It is not enough to do the romantic things I see on TV, because those could be faked as well. Hell, it is a straight up trope (if you want a TVTropes link, I don't have one) that the guys who are bad at romance just do it "by the book," and it is immediately obvious that they are bad at romance. The guys who are good at romance do something unexpectedly sweet that you maybe couldn't have predicted, and that also shows he really knows you. I concluded that the best way to show people that you love them is to do something special for them, something that demonstrates it in a way that couldn't possibly be faked. As the writers' motto goes, "Show, don't tell."

It happens that I also channel a lot of my creativity into being funny, so when you take romance and run it through my demented sense of humor, what comes out can be pretty damn strange.

The best illustration of this occurred two years ago. I was sort of seeing this girl named Lex, and I jokingly observed one time that we had opposite approaches to the law: she wanted to be a police officer, whereas I broke the law just about whenever I felt like it.

This gave me an idea. First, I went and bought the Cold War Unicorns play set:

Then, I took some pictures of the unicorns in suggestive poses, to create this:

In the morning, I e-mailed the picture to her, with no explanation. Later that day, I delivered to her an envelope with the American unicorn inside of it, accompanied by a print of the photograph. (I kept the Communist unicorn for myself.) She laughed, and told me it was one of the most thoughtful gifts anyone had given her. Over a year later, we were not seeing each other, but were still friends, and I told her that whoever she ended up dating or marrying in the future would have a hard time understanding what was so great about my gift. Like, if he did the most romantic thing he could think of, and she responded with, "This is pretty good... but it's not quite as good as the humping unicorns." It might take some effort to make that even begin to make sense.

I mention this, of course, not to talk about how awesome I am, and that bitches love me. (This is something I demonstrate, obviously, so that I don't have to tell you.) I do this to point out: love and romance take on many different forms. To be sure, if my gift is anywhere on the map of romance, it is way out in uncharted territory. The same joke could have completely failed with someone else... but if it were someone else, I would have done something entirely different.

So, when you think of what to do for the special person in your life, whatever day of the year it happens to be, don't ever feel like an idea you've had isn't romantic enough just because it doesn't sound like something romantic. There are as many ways to love as there are people in the world.

But a vacuum is still only a romantic gift if your partner has a cleaning fetish.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

The focus of my writing efforts these days is my new blog, Jurassic Talmud. I am trying to write commentary for every single Dinosaur Comic, in chronological order. Yes, this is going to take a while, and I'm only about two weeks in. Only time will tell if I have the tenacity to see it through to the end.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Patton Oswalt says, Wake Up, Geek Culture. It's Time to Die. He touches on a few things I have been pondering lately, which is the increase in cultural consumption that has occurred within the past few years--or, as he so adroitly points out, the way in which we are consuming popular culture. There used to be very few TV shows that people watched religiously, and discussed with their friends. Shows that, if someone said, "Oh, I don't watch that," you would say, "What's wrong with you?!? You don't know what you're missing!" The first show like that was I Love Lucy. If you were scheduling to go out to dinner with someone, it could never be at the same time as I Love Lucy.

The show of my generation like that was The Simpsons. When I was in fifth grade, some kids actually had a kind of Simpsons discussion group that met during recess every Monday, to talk about the Simpsons episode that aired the previous evening. (This, of course, was nothing like a book club where they talked about the biting social commentary--it was more like, "Oh man, that part was really funny.") As the show became syndicated, it was possible to watch The Simpsons every day, sometimes up to four times in a single day. When I got to college, if a person wasn't able to converse in Simpsons references, it usually meant they had parents who, at some point, strictly controlled what they watched on TV.

Today, you can watch any TV show you want, any time of day. On that note, we are going to take a brief diversion.

-----

People sometimes talk about how bad TV has gotten in the past decade, pointing to the surfeit of crap reality TV that is out there. TV has also, in other respects, gotten really good in the past decade. Setting aside the several original series produced by Showtime and HBO (The Wire. There, I said it.), there are plenty of shows that are far better than what was around in the 90s. To me, the only things that come to mind are sitcoms, since it is one of my preferred genres: Community, Children's Hospital, 30 Rock, Arrested Development, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and The Office, to name but a few. In animation, there has been Avatar, Adventure Time, and quite a few things on Adult Swim.

I think that was has happened is that instead of trying to make their shows appeal to as broad of an audience as possible, producers are trying to make each show appeal to a particular audience in the best possible way. When you form a devoted following, you get people who tune in every time the show is on, regardless of what else is on, whereas before, you might have gotten people who watched your show simply because it was the best thing that happened to be on at the time. (Also, there are now shows you have to pay attention to while you watch them, and shows where you can do housework and only half pay attention while missing nothing.)

What brought this into stark relief for me was when I recently watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Its fans will talk to you about all the things that are so great about it, while its detractors will talk to you about all the things that are bad about it. From time to time, both of them are correct. It has interesting storylines where characters make tough moral choices... but it will sometimes have entire episodes where the characters play hot potato with the idiot ball. There is a lot of fluff and filler. And this is because the show was probably aimed at trying to capture both the audience who likes "good television," and the audience that watches whatever crap happens to be on right now.

If Buffy were made today, I think that it would have half as many episodes per season, and have at least 50% less filler. It would be more watchable for some people, while some of its most die-hard fans would probably be upset that you cut out all of the rich social drama (which was really just people yelling at each other for five minutes, over a misunderstanding).

-----

So, we now live in a world with lots of great television shows. And video games. And movies. And books, good god, there are books everyone is reading! With the power of the internet, we can find out all of the cool things there are to consume in our spare time. We can also see our friends having conversations about these things, and we think, "I would like to be able to participate in that conversation. I will go find out what it is they are talking about." (I might just be speaking for myself, but I don't think the power of implicit social pressure should be denied.) But each one of those TV shows will require several hours of your time to watch all the way through. The movies, two hours apiece. The video games, 10 hours or more. The books depend on how fast you read and what books you are reading, but reading a George R. R. Martin novel will require no less than 10 hours of your time.

Now you are spending every possible minute of your spare time doing nothing but consume popular culture, and it's not enough. Unless you quit your job, and make your life all about media consumption, there is never going to be enough time for all of it. The further problem, as Patton Oswalt says, is that you are never taking the time to reflect on these things and absorb them. In a world where we never have to watch the same show twice, we are missing out on the value of repeated viewing that made some of us conversant in Simpsons references.

This means that you have to make a choice in what you are going to consume, and stop worrying about the fact that you haven't consumed the thing your friends are talking about. I am trying to take this even further, and want to take the time to rewatch some of the shows I have enjoyed the most in the past five years (yes, The Wire, but also Adventure Time). If we don't try to slow ourselves down, I don't think it will be quite as bad as Oswalt says, but it doesn't seem like something I want to be part of. All I can see is a future of image macros that reference 10 different intellectual properties at once.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Developing a personality is hard. Where do you even start? You don't have that kind of time, to say nothing of the humility it requires. Instead, you can have something to talk about, with anyone at all, without ever having to dig down inside to find out who you are! It's so easy! Here are some things to get you started:

Wear a fedora. It's, like, the coolest kind of hat there is. People will compliment you on your snazzy hat, and then you can tell them about all the other hats you have at home. You'll wish you had an extra head, so you could wear two snazzy hats at once.

Start using Linux, which is like the fedora of operating systems. It's better, in fact, because while there are only so many things you can say about hats, you can talk to anyone at all, as much as you want, about Linux. Do they not use Linux? Tell them why they should. Do they already use Linux? Tell them they're a goddamn idiot for using Red Hat, when everyone knows Ubuntu is the best distro. And who the fuck uses Pine anymore? You get the idea. Also, if you learn enough about Linux, you could probably get a job in IT. I mean, like, maybe. I don't know. Linux people and IT people talk the same kind of gibberish to me, so it seems natural.

Wear a utilikilt. For too long, men have been shut out of the benefits of wearing skirts. Now you can wear a skirt that is not only manly, but has a system of pockets like cargo pants. Tell everyone you know about how liberating it feels to wear a utilikilt, especially if you're not wearing underwear with it. Oh yeah, did I mention? It gives you an excuse not to wear underwear, something else women have bogarted for too long.

Learn a lot of jokes. You won't ever have to say something in a conversation that isn't a joke.

Learn a lot of random trivia. The quick and dirty way is to pick up one of those giant trivia books, and read it cover to cover, maybe keeping it in the bathroom to read while you're on the toilet. You can also do this, of course, by reading lots of non-fiction, because those books are frequently peppered with interesting asides. If it's interesting enough for you to commit it to memory, then it should be interesting enough to tell someone you just met. Hold on, did they say something about space shuttles? Now's your chance to talk about Richard Feynman testifying before Congress on why the Challenger exploded! Also, speaking of Richard Feynman... yeah, once you're talking about Feynman, you can talk about anything.

Start making things out of duct tape. You can even make a fedora out of duct tape. (I don't recommend a duct tape utilikilt.) Don't make those foam-padded boffers, though. Those are dumb.

Take up some old lady type of crafting, like knitting or needlepoint, and make video game-related things. You don't even have to play any video games--just pay attention to what video games other people are playing, and making jokes about on the internet. I've never played Portal, but I'd make a needlepoint of the companion cube, and have it say, "The cake is a lie." If I did needlepoint. Anyway, if you had something like that on your wall, everyone would tell you how awesome it was.

These are just some ideas. You might find a new and creative way to get by without a personality! There are no limits! Maybe you want to do nothing but consume popular culture, so that you can talk about those things with other people. Start with The Wire, because, seriously, everyone should watch that show.

Now, not everyone who does the things I just mentioned is trying to replace their personality. Many of them have brilliant, shining personalities, and when you touch on that point of common interest with them, it will allow you to spend a lot more time around them, potentially leading to things like meeting their friends, going to their parties, and having one-night stands with any female they know.

But that guy with the duct tape fedora and the utilikilt? He also uses Linux, and he thinks he's hot shit just because he uses Gentoo. That is some bullshit. Go tell him how much of an asshole he is.

About Me

I'm a college not-quite-graduate, who majored in philosophy. Over time, I noticed that Dinosaur Comics had a fair amount of philosophical content to it. My goal is to expand upon that content, and make it more accessible to the lay reader. When I'm too lazy to do that, I'm just going to over-analyze the comic, or something that is totally unrelated.